Why to Become a Mentor

As a mentor, you not only provide technical guidance to mentees, you also understand their enthusiasm to learn and work for open source development based on which you can select them for the program, and refer their profile to potential employers. You are the person who helps mentees learn and enhance their technical skills, and whose guidance brightens their career. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Good mentees can also become great mentors in future, and contribute effectively to communities.\

Here are some reasons to consider putting yourself forward as a mentor and formally participate in the mentorship program:

• You believe in the value of mentorship by helping new and active developers learn open source development, culture, the tooling and infrastructure to be a productive member of the community.

• You are passionate about teaching and guiding aspiring developers, many of whom may be first time open-source contributors.

• You are eager to bring in new perspectives, ideas, new talent into open-source community and projects.

• You believe that the potential contributions of the mentees, by completing this mentorship program, could add value to the larger project community of which you're an active developer or a maintainer.

It’s not just us telling good about our mentorship program, listen to what our mentors say about this program:

“It is really satisfying as a mentor to see someone soak up all the new knowledge and put it to good use.”

– Hans Verkuil, mentor for Linux Kernel Mentorship Program

“The first thing I would like to emphasize is that this is not just a summer job for the interns. During the internship, they had a chance to get to know the intricacies of different Hyperledger projects. They also worked closely with mentors who guided them throughout their work. But above all else, they became part of an open source community.”

– Attila Klenik, mentor for Hyperledger

“I have always enjoyed sharing knowledge, and this program gave me the opportunity to do that. My proudest moment easily was when my intern spoke about how the things we taught her during the internship directly applied to her current classes. As I mentioned above, our first goal was to make sure our intern learned enough that she could apply it to the rest of her career.”

– Swetha Repakula, mentor for Running Web Assembly Smart Contracts in Fabric

“I had the satisfaction of supervising a hardworking intern who was able to create running code for the seemingly difficult idea of running Solidity contracts on Fabric. My hope is that the project does not end with the culmination of the internship and sparks interest among other members of the community.”

– Salman A. Baset, mentor for Running Solidity Smart Contracts on Hyperledger Fabric

“Mentoring has been a great experience for me. I got a wide selection of candidates and could choose people well suited by giving practice tasks. During the mentorship, my mentees were very excited and had a lot of energy, -- something only seen in people starting out. They were hardworking and were able to make good contributions and bring fresh ideas to the table. It improved my knowledge in the area as well (when you teach you learn again) while also getting some work done (which otherwise I would have to make time to do myself). My menees are now planning to continue to work in Linux kernel space and I'm glad that I got an opportunity to add more contributors to the kernel. I have also networked the me mentees with other engineers in the area I'm working on and further given them more opportunities to contribute in the future. I hope they continue even after the mentorship program.”

– Joel Fernandes, mentor for Linux Kernel Mentorship Program\

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